Thursday Apr 25, 2024
Thursday Apr 25, 2024
Monday, 20 January 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.” Those are the words of Alexander Graham Bell whose deeds connected the world, highlighting the power of focus.
In ‘Focus,; Psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman, of Emotional Intelligence fame, offers a fresh look at what we all need. It is perhaps today’s scarcest resource and the secret to high performance and fulfilment. The reality is either we focus or we fail.
As we are much aware, focus involves concentrated attention. Both eastern spiritual practitioners and western success proponents agree on the need to have attention. It is easier said than done with regard to maintaining focus. Henry Mintzberg, a veteran management scholar discussed this in his book, ‘The Nature of Managerial Work’.
Managers must typically work on a variety of tasks simultaneously and rely on their colleagues to complete a job. Maintaining focus can be very challenging in some situations. It can be a case of e-mails or females. Ensuring concentration without getting confused is what is required.
Going deeper, focus is associated with the state of mind. In Zen Buddhism, it says your mind is like a “drunken monkey”. Meditation helps you to tie it up to a tree so that mind and body are intact. All great religions have spoken about the need to focus both on material and non-material needs. In a competitive business world, power of focus has become valuable as never before. It applies to Sri Lankan managers as well.
It was 10 years ago that Jack Canfield, Mark Hansen and Les Hewitt wrote “The Power of Focus” where they highlighted how to hit business, personal and financial targets with absolute confidence and certainty. Meanwhile, Professors Heike Bruch of University of Saint Gallon, Switzerland and Sumantra Ghoshal of London Business School did extensive research on the performance of managers on a global scale and identified focus and energy as two key factors that contribute to the way managers achieve results.
Amidst many other such research and publications on focus, Goleman offers something fresh backed up by medical research. Let’s see what he has to tell us.
Focus for results
According to Goleman, focus connects us into the science of attention in all its varieties. He boils down attention research into a threesome: inner, other, and outer focus. Drawing on rich case studies from fields as diverse as competitive sports, education, the arts, and business, he shows why high-achievers need all three kinds of focus, and explains how those who rely on “smart practices” excel while others do not. Such “smart practices” range from being positive, proactive and productive. 
All forms of attention, Goleman argues, arise from the interplay between two very different parts of the brain. The older, lower brain, working largely outside of consciousness, constantly monitors the signals coming in from the senses. Acting as a warning system, it alerts us to shifts in our surroundings, pains in our body, memories of worrying events. Such “bottom-up” attention, as neuroscientists call it, is impulsive, uncontrolled and often commanded by fear and other raw emotions. The alerts that stream from the lower brain are so visceral that, when they pop into the conscious mind, they’re hard to resist.
Working to control all those primitive impulses is the neocortex, the brain’s more recently evolved outer layer. The source of voluntary, or “top-down,” attention, the neocortex’s executive-control circuitry is what enables us to screen out distractions and focus our mind on a single task or train of thought. Without it, we’d have the attention span of a chipmunk.
"What appears to be most at risk is our ability to experience open awareness. Always a rare and elusive form of thinking, it seems to be getting rarer and more elusive. Our modern search-engine culture celebrates information gathering and problem solving — ways of thinking associated with orienting and selective focus — but has little patience for the mind’s reveries. Letting one’s thoughts wander seems frivolous, a waste of practical brainpower. Worse, our infatuation with social media is making it harder to hear the mind’s whispers. Solitude has fallen out of fashion. Even when we’re by ourselves, we’re rarely alone with our thoughts – Nicholas Carr, reflecting on Goleman’s book"
“Top-down wiring,” Goleman writes, “adds talents like self-awareness and reflection, deliberation and planning to our mind’s repertoire.” As we go through the day, the direction and steadiness of our mental gaze are shaped by the “continual dance” between the top-down and bottom-up systems of attention.
Goleman’s premise is that our ability to block out the mass of digital distractions is diminished by the “cognitive exhaustion” they cause, observes Adam Palin, a business education researcher of Financial Times, UK. Without finding ways to be focused, we cannot help but be distracted.
We tend to drift away from mindfulness to what Goleman calls “mindlessness”. It is when our thoughts are always wandering. This is potentially “the single biggest waster of attention in the workplace”, he says. Developing its opposite – the increasingly popular trait of mindfulness – by training the brain to pay complete attention to the current moment is crucial. Mindfulness allows us to concentrate on what is important, and not be distracted by the noise around us.
Involuntary – or “bottom-up” – neural processes cause the mind to drift and, in particular, to be distracted by visual stimuli. To counter this habit, we need to apply intentional “top-down” focus, which “offers the mind a lever to manage our brain”. This battle between top and bottom processes matters because our capacity to apply full attention, “neural locking” is a great mental asset.
Triple forms of focus
High achievers, as Goleman already told us, master three types of focus: inner, other and outer, which he calls “triple-focus”. “Inner” focus describes self-awareness; “other” relates to empathy; and “outer” focus refers to awareness of our environment.
“Think of attention as a mental muscle that we can strengthen by a workout.” Advocates Goleman. To develop greater cognitive control, we can exercise our minds through methods such as “single-pointed concentration”. The gift we Asians have in abundance is of immense help here: meditation.
For business leaders, the need for mindfulness is particularly acute, According to Goleman, “Leadership itself hinges on effectively capturing and directing the collective attention.” This involves focusing on developments outside the organisation, as well as attracting and directing the attention of people inside and outside the organisation.
As an illustration, Goleman contrasts the success of Apple’s late chief executive Steve Jobs with the leadership of BlackBerry, its struggling rival. Upon his return to Apple in 1997, Jobs streamlined its strategy to focus on just four products, each designed for specific markets. This, according to Goleman, depended on a vigilant attention to what consumers were looking for to chart Apple’s course. By contrast, BlackBerry failed to respond early enough to the iPhone era and its domination of the corporate phone market crumbled.
Goleman, however, questions the purpose of achieving true focus without worthy objectives that extend beyond our own personal ends. He is of the view that considering how our cognitive bias towards present concerns means we “lack the sufficient bandwidth” to recognise existential threats, specifically the one posed by climate change. I recall the way he elaborated this in his previous work of following up Emotional Intelligence with Ecological Intelligence.
Focus and surroundings
Attention is not only a product of brain function. It’s also influenced by culture and, in particular, by the technologies we use to navigate and make sense of the world, observes, Nicholas Carr, a New York Times journalist, in reflecting on Goleman’s book.
Our smartphones and other networked gadgets allow us to jack into an unending supply of messages and alerts, leading to a situation called ‘impoverished attention’. In short, it can be called being attention deficit. Professor Uditha Liyanage mentioned this at the recent MBA inauguration of PIM, referring to Goleman, as something learning managers have to be watchful of.
Let me quote Nicholas Carr in his further reflection on ‘Focus’:
“What appears to be most at risk is our ability to experience open awareness. Always a rare and elusive form of thinking, it seems to be getting rarer and more elusive. Our modern search-engine culture celebrates information gathering and problem solving — ways of thinking associated with orienting and selective focus — but has little patience for the mind’s reveries. Letting one’s thoughts wander seems frivolous, a waste of practical brainpower. Worse, our infatuation with social media is making it harder to hear the mind’s whispers. Solitude has fallen out of fashion. Even when we’re by ourselves, we’re rarely alone with our thoughts.”
What emerges clearly is a need to pay attention to “being attentive” in focusing on the power of focus.
Way forward
“I find hope in the darkest of days, and focus in the brightest; I do not judge the universe,” said the Dalai Lama. “Focus and simplicity are my mantras,” said Steve Jobs. East and West alike, focus is an essential echelon for excellence. This is true for private sector managers as well as public sector administrators. I would not say Goleman is perfect in his analysis and approach. Yet, his inspiring insights will immensely help individuals and institutions alike to use the focus as a force.
[The writer is Professor of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. With an initial BSc Chemical engineering Honours degree from Moratuwa, he proceeded to the University of Cambridge for his PhD. He is the Project Director of COSTI (Coordinating Secretariat for Science, Technology and Innovation), which is a newly established State entity with the mandate of coordinating and monitoring scientific affairs. He can be reached via email on [email protected].]
